Brown has a vague sense that there was a meltdown with a TV star. But the former Governor Moonbeam is now Governor Laser Beam; the only meltdown he cares about is California’s, with its $26.6 billion budget shortfall.

“There’s only one game in my life,” he tells me, as we split Southwest Airlines peanuts and a turkey and cheese sandwich in a hotel at the corner of Disneyland Drive and Magic Way, where he has come to address a police convention.

If you want to dish on tiger blood and Adonis DNA, go elsewhere. In the fantastic, monastic world of Jerry Brown, the talk veers toward Wittgenstein, the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and preventing the collapse of the American empire.

The shock of dark hair is gone, but Jerry Brown is still Jerry Brown. The prickliness, bluntness, questioning, calculating. That against-the-grain attitude; disdain for materialism, emptiness and politics as usual; that Jesuit-Buddhist outlook.

And yet, Jerry Brown is very different. The Howard Beale rants have become amiable riffs. Instead of tossing off insults, as when he called the Clintons the Bonnie and Clyde of American politics, he offers dry wit. He is less coiled.

“I’m very happy,” he says, adding with a grin, “I have a wife.”

In the old days, he tried to get people to accept their limits when they didn’t think there were limits; now that they’ve learned the hard way that there are, his gospel sells well.

Once, he baked in existential estrangement, opportunistically tilting at authority figures — challenging the leaders of his party and bristling at the large shadow of his charming Irish Catholic dad, Pat Brown, California’s governor in the ’60s.

He knows there were sins of arrogance. “The first time, most of the legislators were all older than me,” recalls the governor, who is trim and energetic at 72. “I was on the warpath against corruption, and the politicians took it like I was against them, which to some extent —” He trails off, then picks up: “I thought I knew a lot, but obviously 30 years later, I know a hell of a lot more.”

On his first tour as governor, Brown was labeled a “nonracist George Wallace in a pinstripe suit” by The Times’s Anthony Lewis. In The Times Magazine, Richard Reeves noted that Brown was popular only with people who did not know him.

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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

The governor still has deep ambition, but it’s no longer cold and destructive. It’s warm and constructive. It’s now anchored in the West, not drawn to the White House.

“I have a greater focus here on Sacramento,” he told reporters recently, “so I’m not burdened with this, you know, looking out there toward the East.”

Once a priest-like bachelor and loner whose only visible attachment was to power, Brown now seems almost cuddly. At an Oscar lunch at the Beverly Hills mansion of Diane Von Furstenberg and Barry Diller, Brown and his wife, 52-year-old Anne Gust Brown, stood by the fire chatting with other guests.

Anne did not know she was coming to the lunch and had nothing to wear, so Brown swept her off to the store of his old friend Von Furstenberg and helped her pick out three frocks. He reminisced about how he had conspired with Von Furstenberg to design his wife’s wedding dress.

Was this, I wondered, the same guy who sometimes showed up in the ’70s with mismatched shoes?

His clever and charming wife, who served as top campaign adviser and is now de facto chief of staff, is a huge improvement over his ’90s Sancho Panza, Jacques Barzaghi, who wore a black beret and made strange comments like: “We are not disorganized. Our campaign transcends understanding.”

Brown has a spiritual calling — using his savvy about his state to save it from the brink — along with a wife he’s crazy about. And, instead of the usual mattress on the floor or commune space, the governor who twice rejected the governor’s mansion has “a very hip loft,” as he says with a dash of irony, in Sacramento.

He has been using the loft to have Democrats from the coastal areas and Republicans from the mountains over for California wine and wooing, trying to create enough “conviviality” to “mush it together to get enough votes.”

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He’s pondering putting a drinking tent outside the Statehouse to replace Arnold Schwarzenegger’s smoking tent (which the ex-Governator took with him, along with his Conan the Barbarian sword).

If the legislators approve his plan, a mix of spending cuts and tax extensions, the big test will be a referendum on it in June. If his plan passes, California could become the laboratory for how to do things right, the anti-Wisconsin. It is remarkable to watch the governors on two coasts, Brown and Andrew Cuomo, both sons of iconic liberal governors, boldly go against the grain to do what works today. They are eliminating or reforming many of their dads’ hallmark programs.

Some of Brown’s ideas that seemed wacky in the ’70s have now gone mainstream. When I ask if he’s less flaky, he replies, “That was a canard.” Then he goes off on a semantic tangent. “Canard. That’s a good word. It’s hard to use, though, without being awkward. I’ve not found too many sentences I can put it in.” Then he resumes defending himself: “I’m open and innovative and experimental, and sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t work.”

He says that in a world where politics is ever more scripted by “gnomes in the basement,” he simply tries to speak his mind. He adds that he’s no longer an “ingénue — is that the right word, does that apply only to girls?”

“I am more confident,” he says. “When you’ve done something for decades, you know the drill.”

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Istvan Banyai

He calls himself “an insider with an outsider’s mind.” He strives to avoid the sort of “group-think” that led to Vietnam. He says he has traveled through many “micro-universes” — including a cloistered Jesuit seminary and a free-wheeling Berkeley, the luxe life of pals like Von Furstenberg and the spartan life of friends like Mother Teresa, and “to some extent I stand outside and I look at them.”

He was a precursor to the Tea Party, and he admits he tends to be a “tear-it-apart guy.” “But I feel I’m in a more constructive mode at this time of my life,” he said. “I understand hostility and alienation from the soulless bureaucratic state, but the Tea Party is a tear-it-apart group. We have to have continuity along with change if we’re going to hold the place together.”

After watching Meg Whitman squander $178.5 million of her own money, Californians seem to be getting a kick out of Brown’s cheap side. With his gift for symbolism or, some say, gimmickry, he froze state hiring, banned official cellphones and barred state agencies from giving out swag — coffee mugs, hats and cups. He flies commercial, often solo, on Southwest Airlines, with a senior citizen discount.

“It’s a message,” he says. “The medium is the message.”

Was he cheap as a child? “During World War II, to get butter, we had little ration tickets,” he says. “I thought it was kind of fun.” His uncle Frank, he says, was so tight he had a pay phone in his house.

Noting that he followed actors into the Statehouse twice, Brown observes: “A lot of this is theater. How do you communicate to 38 million people? You’re not sitting down talking to them. So it’s gesture, symbol, the narrative, the drama. Who’s the protagonist? Who’s the antagonist?”

He speaks of his father more fondly. “He always told me to get married,” he says, noting that his parents had liked Anne, a former Gap vice president, whom Brown dated for 15 years.

“I’m slow to make commitments,” he says. “Once you get into these things, it’s hard to get out, the permanence thing.”

Now, he says, “it’s just fun to do things together. And she’s very smart. And she’s very loving. And fun.”

Maybe, he muses, he should have married her earlier, but “my ambition was, you know, soaring in a different direction.”

I asked how they spend their free time.

“Fun is just reading or working out,” he says. “We have the hills of Oakland. Quiet dinners at home. It’s very important to have candles at the table.” They honeymooned on a canoe trip down the Russian River in wine country, and Brown says he wants to take more California exploring trips.

His mom once told me she hoped that he and Anne would have a little Edmund G. Brown 3rd. I wonder if not having kids was a regret. “It would have been nice, but stressful,” he says. “When you have a couple kids, that becomes the dominant focus. So our dominant focus is what we’re doing.”

On his way out, he grabs an apple and a banana. They’re free.

Frank Rich is off today.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 6, 2011, on Page WK10 of the New York edition with the headline: Governor Brown Redux: The Iceman Melteth. Today's Paper|Subscribe